Say What?

I am perhaps more sensitive than most people to jargon. I have spent
a large part of my working life, first as a journalist and now as a
journalism professor and author, trying to avoid speaking or writing
it. My models have been George Orwell, Red Smith (who quit Sports
Illustrated because copy editors kept inserting the word "moreover"
into his stories), and the King James version of the Bible.

Of course, journalism, like any other trade or profession today, has
its own jargon. But as jargon goes, journalism's is refreshingly blunt:
You slug a story and kill a graf. Nowhere does it approach the capacity
of educational jargon to obscure the obvious. And I should know. I
serve on the board of education in the Highland (N.Y.) Central School
District.

When I was still just a regular taxpayer, I would sit in the audience
at school board meetings and try to follow the discussion, but would
soon catch myself contemplating the mole on the board president's face.
I would feel guilty about having allowed my attention to wander. Now I
realize that the meetings were conducted in a language designed
precisely to make you focus on something else, anything else, even a
hairy mole.

It is a language with all the melodiousness of the dry heaves. One
of its chief characteristics is the use of unfamiliar,
scientific-sounding abbreviations. School administrators can hardly
speak without referring to IEP, ERB, DLT, ISS, SCE, or RCT. After
sufficient exposure to this kind of speech, the average person may feel
a need for CPR.

Educational jargon also consists of what I call "noun-droids"--three
or more nouns that have been wired together to form big, imposing, but
ultimately inhuman phrases. I can open my vinyl binder labeled "School
Board Workbook" to almost any page and find blood-curdling examples,
from "Tri-State Assessment Model Reference Card" to "teacher
alternative compensation pilot." All those nouns in a row seem to
suggest solidity and order, but they rarely denote or describe anything
tangible. They mostly serve as camouflage for a lack of real activity.
With just nouns, no verbs, the mind can't leap or grope or dream.

And then there are the buzzwords. "Evaluation" is one. "Model" is
another. "Indicators" is a third. Put them all together, as in
"value-added evaluation model key indicators," and you have the local
patois, as well as the winner in an ugly language contest.

I hold the schools of education at colleges and universities across
the country responsible for most of this verbal sludge. It seems you
can't graduate from one of them as a certified teacher unless you can
add the suffix "based" to at least 500 words. Thus we have site-based
councils and performance-based assessments and computer-based learning.
What's next? Desk-based students?

If there is an air of menace about educational jargon, is it
because it is intended to designate all people without the proper
vocabulary as intruders?

But I rave. Listening to or reading educational jargon will do that to
you. The other day I got a particularly heavy dose when, as part of my
board responsibilities, I went through a batch of job applications from
prospective teachers. Applicants had been asked to write a brief
statement about their experience and abilities. Once they ran out of
jargon--ready-made phrases like "full potential," "least restrictive
environment," "self-esteem"--they were lost. None was more lost than
the young woman who applied for a job as a gym teacher. "It is very
important for society," she wrote with a dictionary far from her elbow,
"to emphasize lifelong physical activity instead of a sedimentary
lifestyle."

Speaking of sediment, Orwell had an absolute abhorrence of muddy
language. In his classic 1948 essay, "Politics and the English
Language," he argued that muddy language produces muddy thinking as
often as the other way around. If we clarify our language, he said, we
can clarify our thinking, and thinking clearly about the state of the
world is a prerequisite for change. Orwell proposed that we improve the
world by beginning, as he put it, "at the verbal end."

American public schools are under huge pressure today to improve.
Politicians, parents, and taxpayer groups are calling for our students
to perform better, both straight up and in comparison with students
from Western Europe and Japan. But improving academic performance isn't
simply a matter of raising standards. It costs money. It takes stamina.
It antagonizes all the secret allies of the status quo.

There are more of these--and they are more powerful--than you may
realize. I don't want to sound like someone who believes in
conspiracies involving UFOs and Elvis, but the fact is that it is
appallingly difficult to get people to change their work patterns even
a little. School boards, schools of education, teachers' unions, and
teachers themselves are all accustomed to and invested in things as
they are. The current system, whatever its failures, provides school
board candidates with fat issues, schools of education with fat
enrollments, and public school teachers with fat salaries.

Anyway, reform is hard work. It is easier to elaborate language, to
add layers of jargon, to paint over problems with bureaucratese.
So-called "stakeholders" on so-called "building-level teams," utilizing
so-called "shared decisionmaking" as outlined in the so-called "Plan to
Plan," implement so-called "heterogeneous groupings." By which point, a
mere parent hasn't the slightest clue what the so-called "hell" is
going on.

If there is an air of menace about educational jargon, it is
because, like all jargon, it is intended to scare off intruders--or,
more precisely, to designate all people without the proper vocabulary
as intruders. The result has been a steady decrease in public
understanding and a steady increase in public hostility. How else can
the public feel but hostile to something ominously labeled
"criterion-referenced assessments" or "the performance-based process"?
We should turn these long, vague phrases back into simple action verbs.
We should train teachers and school administrators to speak so that
they can be understood. We should communicate with each other as if
with the stars.

But until that happens, perhaps everyone should just shut up.

Howard Good is a professor of journalism at the State University of New
York at New Paltz and a member of the board of education in the
Highland (N.Y.) Central School District. He has published four books,
the latest being Diamonds in the Dark: America, Baseball, and the
Movies (Scarecrow Press, 1997).

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Related Stories

In our Nov. 6, 1996, commentary, "Talking to Parents About School Reform,"
Linda Freeman argues that parents should not be faulted for viewing
educational jargon as an attempt to slip something by them.
Our glossary of education
terms is designed to help you wade through education jargon.

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